Protect your energy
It has been a crazy year since last summner, and I finally have the mental space and the genuine desire to articulate what has been weighing on my mind.
Recently, I came across a concept coming from Warren Buffett: he suggests that your investment career should be viewed as a punch card with only 20 slots. You get 20 punches for your entire career, meaning you only have 20 truly significant decisions to make. This rule struck me like a sudden rain saturating a desert that had been parched for a decade.
Perhaps from Buffett’s perspective, an individual is always “trading”. Whether we call ourselves investors or not, we are constantly exchanging our life force—trading work hours for food on the table or attention for information. In many ways, our perception of the world is a broad market where we are forced to participate, navigating a flood of information and persistent price fluctuations. Our core capital isn’t just money, it is limited time and attention. You can only read so many books, and you can only make so many quality decisions in a day.
Too many of us, myself included, don’t know how to protect this capital. Instead, we let it be consumed by “transaction friction”. We bleed out our energy by worrying about worst-case scenarios that never manifest, or by consuming endless posts (much like this one). We end up trading our lives for the worst possible assets. Then, when a true, significant signal finally appears, we have no energy left to analyze it and no courage left to place our bet. Or more pathetically, when a life-changing slot is ready to be punched, we don’t even recognize its importance because we are moving with the mindless momentum of a robot.
Dealing with these insignificant, tiny “trades” gives us the illusion of control, but we are often just spectators in our own lives. Before you punch a slot on your card, you never realize how fragile you are, both physically and psychologically, or how cruel the market can be.
For the last six months, my daily routine has been a cycle of stagnation. I would wake up at 9:00 AM, immediately feeling the sting of regret for starting so late. I’d spend my first hours reading emails, texts, and news that didn’t matter. At the office, I worked in the most unproductive way possible, squandering the most valuable asset I possess in my 20s: time. By the time I hit the pillow, I was a nervous wreck, sometimes getting up and sending out internship applications as a “fix” for my lack of direction. Since my half-marathon in Baltimore last October, I’ve gained significant weight. I’ve realized that the eating wasn’t the cause of the gain, but rather a symptom, a stress-eating feedback loop fueled by my despair over the future. My uncertainty and the perceived pressure from those around me have acted like a black hole, sucking away my precious life assets.
Like one of my previous summer interns, I am a deeply interest-driven person. If a task doesn’t spark my curiosity, I find it nearly impossible to engage with. However, if I find a topic fascinating, I will stay up until the early hours of the morning researching it, lost in the flow of discovery. I used to view this as a flaw, a lack of discipline or professionalism. But looking at my life through the lens of the 20-slot punch card, I see it differently now. My interest is actually my internal filter. It is the mechanism that tells me which slots are worth punching and which are just noise. People change in their lives but the important question remains the same: what is your life actually driven by?
The mistake I’ve made this year wasn’t a lack of effort, but mismanaged curiosity. I let my attention be hijacked by the mundane because I was afraid that if I didn’t trade in the common market, I would be left behind. I was trying to force myself to be a high-frequency trader of boring tasks, when I am actually designed for the long game. So moving forward, it is okay to be bored and do nothing. Save my energy and wait for the one topic, the one project, or the one person that makes me want to stay up until 4am. That is truly the important slot. Market is always open, and I don’t have to trade everyday. Put the punch card back in my pocket, and I’ll be waiting for a signal that actually matters.